Doctor Who: The BBC Books #60 – Parallel 59 by Natalie Dallaire & Stephen Cole

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#30

Parallel 59

By Natalie Dallaire & Stephen Cole

If you’re wondering what a typical Eighth Doctor, Fitz and Compassion story looks like, Parallel 59 has some thoughts on that. We’re once again dropping hints about the ongoing development of Compassion, and the things troubling her; the Doctor still wants to nurture some camaraderie with his companions; Fitz continues to wonder if he’s the same person, or even a real person after what he went through in Interference; and Fitz also gets a life and settles down with a girlfriend.

That last one has happened a few times in general and now two books in a row, with the domesticity and the (occasional but not constant) first person narration and everything. Parallel 59 seems to have been a relatively late addition to fill a gap (via Pieces Of Eighth) and to his credit Steve Cole* makes all the appropriate allusions to Fitz’s similar experience in Frontier Worlds so that it sounds like it’s just one of those things that it all happened again. (*Natalie Dallaire is Cole’s sister. It sounds like Cole wrote most of the book. From POE again.) But the impact is inevitably lessened when it’s such a close repeat, like poor old Beltempest showing up with an inter-planetary snafu right after The Janus Conjunction had a creditable go at it.

That said, Fitz’s time in the strange world of Mechta is hands down the best thing in the book. A place used for recuperation before sending its convalescent citizens back to “Homeplanet” [sic], Mechta has an unusual, unearthly calm about it. No one needs to work very much, everything costs the same, there’s little excitement but the people are happy enough anyway. When it’s time to go you’re carted off to the wide world in a mysterious red taxi — and if that sets off your “something ain’t right” alarm, congratulations, you’ve encountered science fiction before.

Fitz doesn’t seem to have a job this time but he has plenty of larks. He quickly falls in with a group of friends and gets his end away (as if you had to ask) via a slightly creepy and very cheesy chat-up game on a tram. He has an affair with an older woman (Anya) and then gets true feelings for someone (Filippa); later he has another dalliance (Denna). No flies on Fitz this week. The Filippa portion of the story doesn’t really expand until it starts unravelling, by which time Anya is clinging more and more to his affections. Her husband, Nikol, runs a local conspiracy/freedom fighter group that aims to uncover the truth about Mechta. Fitz mostly just humours him for Anya’s sake, but being one of the TARDIS gang he soon begins putting in the hours to investigate. Towards the end of the story all he’s really interested in is making amends with Filippa, but it’s at this point that Mechta itself begins to twist and fall apart, dissolving into creepy hallucinations and unusual behaviours.

I think Parallel 59 just about overcomes the “we’ve been here before”-ness of a domestic Fitz by a) making it more prominent, b) making it not a work thing this time (he’s not here to achieve anything, he’s just waiting for rescue), c) not fridging his girlfriend again and d) letting him really sit with it all afterwards. Recovering in bed it occurs to Fitz that he needs to change, Scrooge-like; I’m not sure exactly what he means but playing fast and loose with people’s hearts might be it. He won’t be able to make a true go of it with Filippa, but we leave them in a surprisingly meaningful place, with the TARDIS butterfly room making a welcome reappearance. I’m fine with repeats like this in theory, just so long as they serve a purpose. Hopefully this one will.

As to the non-Fitz stuff, it gets off to a terrific start with the Doctor and Compassion hurtling through space in a claustrophobic escape capsule. Talk about starting your story late! I wondered if we were going to flash back to fill all of that in, but no, Cole/Dallaire commits to this and the story follows on from there. Kudos, as it creates a sense of momentum that comes in handy. (We later learn that the TARDIS landed on a space station/“Bastion”; Fitz and the TARDIS got separated and the other two had to get out of there fast.)

The capsule lands on Skale, a planet carved into different Parallels. “59” isn’t very friendly but from context we can assume that’s also true of the others. Skale exists in a general state of xenophobic paranoia, so you can guess how well the Doctor and Compassion are received. The Doctor is soon a prisoner (having charitably but incorrectly assumed that staying put during an escape attempt will denote innocence) and Compassion is soon hanging with the rebels.

It’s worth saying at this point that the whole authority vs rebels thing is not very clear. Parallel 59 is obviously a very strict and unhappy place, with things like enforced marriages and mandated birth rates, but it’s still not exactly fleshed out what it is they’re fighting against. There’s the Project, aka the reason for all those Bastions in orbit, but there’s a lot of secrecy around what all that’s in aid of. No one seems terribly bothered about the authoritarianism either, and when we meet someone working on the inside to aid the rebels, their methods are so casually murderous that it becomes difficult to see where they stand on any of it. The bulk of Parallel 59 just feels like tension and action by rote, people doing stuff loudly and with as much conviction as they can force.

Cole/Dallaire don’t seem all that invested in the world-building — we don’t even see the other Parallels — but they invest in the characters. A bugbear from Longest Day rears its head here, though: there’s too many of them. We’ve got multiple, mostly older upper-management types in the military (such as Dam, Narkompros and Terma), a few icy female officers with shifting loyalties (Yve, Jessen and Slatin), some lowly workers with notable quirks (Jedkah and Makkersvil), some general staff members (sorry, don’t remember); then there’s the whole rebellion side of things (including Rojin and Tod) and Fitz’s gang (the aforementioned ladies, plus Serjey and Low Rez). Cole/Dallaire do a good job of imbuing some or even most of these with nuances, but it’s a losing battle with so many of them, especially when Makkersvil just reads like Fitz 2.0, with the spotty romantic history and everything. Dam has quite an interesting neurosis about his arranged marriage, but for some reason he’s the only person on Skale that thinks about that custom at all. Narkompros is a hypochondriac (or is he?) and Terma is a jerk; both suffer horribly from “pointlessly intransigent authority figure” syndrome.

That’s most of the plot in a nutshell, people barking “alien saboteur!” at the Doctor, the bunch of boring morons. It’s here that Parallel 59 runs into another problem: the Doctor and Compassion don’t know what’s going on for most of it. (Fitz, isolated, stands even less chance of a handy info dump.) Neither the authority figures nor the rebels seem keen to fill in the Doctor or Compassion respectively, which helps keep up the suspense I suppose, but I think that comes at the expense of clear stakes. I’m guessing the reason for this is wanting the truth about Mechta to be a big surprise, but as the entire book hinges on what’s going on with that place and/or those Bastions I just ended up waiting to find out why any of this mattered. It’s a miscalculation that leaves most of the book marking time — admittedly at quite a lick, the pace being firmly set by that action-packed opening.

When we find out the truth it’s a mixed bag. Mechta is, as you may have guessed, an artificial construct: hundreds of people have their minds uploaded to it. This isn’t exactly a new concept but it’s one with legs. The Matrix came out not long before this (the book was written concurrently, okay!) and Doctor Who did something similar in Silence In The Library. It’s compellingly and creepily executed here.

Sadly though, we’re not done yet. While they’re in Mechta their bodies are also used in those “escape capsules” to form a sort of sensor net around the planet. They are also used remotely as bombs. Right. I found myself muttering “Whaaat” at some of that; it’s fairly cockamamie even for an SF novel to multi-purpose a high concept that way, and it’s a lot to take in so late in the book. (P192!) Impressively (or not, YMMV) Parallel 59 pulls yet another surprise out of its pockets by then having the much-scapegoated aliens show up after all and attack. This neatly galvanises all the Parallels, but again it’s so late in the game (P253!!!) that both the attack and the response feel like frenzied action housekeeping. Where were these definitive stakes during the rest of the book?

Your best bet while waiting for all of this to kick off is to follow the Doctor and Compassion, but Fitz is clearly king as far as the interesting stuff is concerned. The Doctor vamps well enough to keep from getting executed; I’m just sick of the old “we don’t believe you” routine. His attitude towards Compassion fluctuates at times. He can be desperately concerned about her, but also quick to shut her down, and happy to use her like a sonic screwdriver. Given his need for Compassion and Fitz to build a rapport in Frontier Worlds, he’s surprisingly poor at doing it himself here.

Compassion has been quietly building her part throughout these books and there’s more of that here — the Doctor openly worrying about what’s going on with her, her having strange dreams and feeling like the TARDIS is having an adverse effect on her — but there simply isn’t that much for her to do once she inadvertently destroys a medical scanner* and runs off with the rebels. (*She has one heart to the locally normal two, rendering her and not the Doctor the odd one out. This is one of the few very attempts to make this alien race at all distinct from humans.) Compassion is more of a grumpy plot device in Parallel 59, but to be fair that’s more feature than bug; like Seven Of Nine, she was written with tech enhancements that can move plots along, and it would be foolish to pretend otherwise. At least you can make something of the conflict between machine and humanity. We touch on that here.

Not having read anything else by Dallaire it’s perhaps inevitable that I mostly viewed this through the lens of Cole’s books. In that context it’s an improvement. While he continues to overpopulate the sidelines and doesn’t always get the most out of every idea, there are a few strong ones and there’s a firm eye on the ongoing, and even minor character stuff. It feels like we’re heading for an all-round excellent Steve Cole book at some point (maybe keep Natalie on speed dial?), and while Parallel 59 isn’t there yet it has enough going for it to rollick along nicely in the meantime.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #59 – Corpse Marker by Chris Boucher

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#27

Corpse Marker

By Chris Boucher

It’s sequel time! I’m still finding it somewhat novel when BBC Books do these, as they’ve resisted the urge to make them a regular thing. Zeta Major and Divided Loyalties are the closest things so far to picking up where a TV story left off; otherwise it tends to be just returning elements, or revisited books.

If you are dubious about sequels then this one might win you over from the outset. Not only are we returning to The Robots Of Death, a prized Season 14 story, but Chris Boucher is back to write it. My only note of caution was that I didn’t enjoy his previous novel; I found Last Man Running a muddle of action over story. Not to worry though: whether Boucher was inspired by the link to his telly work or he’s just warmed to the theme of his second book, Corpse Marker is much more assured.

The Doctor and Leela are back on Kaldor. (The Doctor notes that “this looks disappointingly familiar”, which may or may not be authorial discomfort about sequels. Boucher also sets out a theme of being surprised by your surroundings, so I don’t think he’s just being cheeky here.) Uvanov, Toos and Poul are still around, and perhaps inevitably so are concerns about robots. There are assassin robots that look like people. There’s a prototype robot, somewhere, that’s so advanced it can share its programming with any other robot nearby. There is an Anti-Robot Front attacking robot factories, confusingly following the teachings of “Taren Capel”. (The maniacally pro-robot figure who died in the TV story.)

Much of this might be happening — just as lessons have not been learned — because the killer robot incident from the TV story was never publicised. That’s part of the general atmosphere on Kaldor, a world with information control and a severe wealth disparity between ruling families and slums. (This disparity, one character reminds us, is the work of the people and not the robots.) I suspect one of the reasons Boucher came back to this was the richness of Kaldor as a setting. We previously only knew it via the characters (and costumes!) on the Sandminer, but we get to expand on that here by spending time with the various groups, particularly the ARF. It’s clearly a subject that would continue to interest Boucher as he contributed to the Kaldor City audio series, which carried over some characters originated in this book.

Whilst it is satisfying to delve into the world of Kaldor, it’s perhaps more gratifying to revisit the old characters. Poul, originally played by David Collings (who narrates the audiobook) is in an even worse state than before. His robophobia is all-consuming, and so it should be given the circumstances. He no longer has a friendly robot for support — come to think of it, there are no almost-sentient “good guy” robots to be found here. (D84, you were too pure for this world.) Poul probably fares the least well of the old “Robots” gang, with his heightened mania giving way rather suddenly near the end to a more blissful amnesia; it’s a sort of inverse of his trajectory in the TV story. He provides a good example though of what Kaldor’s problems can drive people to.

Uvanov, played before with pompous grandeur by Russell Hunter (and then again in the audio series) absolutely lives up to his TV persona as he manipulates events, keeps secrets and grasps for power. Much of the plot ends up spinning around Uvanov, and fortunately he’s dynamic to be around. He makes an unusual scene partner with the Doctor, as Uvanov is familiar with him, doesn’t necessarily like him but still aids him where he can. (Whilst plotting to steal his TARDIS, of course.) It’s through Uvanov that we get our clearest look at how Kaldor’s First Families operate.

Then there’s Toos, who has evolved the most from her TV appearance. Apparently gone is her tendency to panic, perhaps because of what she has been through. She’s virtually unflappable now, whilst leaning even more into a sense of decadence and style that feels recognisably like Pamela Salem. She demonstrates for us the sort of casual dreadfulness of the Kaldor rich, referring to herself at one point as “too beautiful and far too rich to care.” (This is at least partly a front: during a power outage we’re privy to her thoughts, which immediately head for doom. “She could hear them coming and she could feel them reaching and she could feel them closing round and she wanted to die immediately, now before it could happen, now before it would happen.” This repetition-as-a-sign-of-instability is something Boucher plays on throughout the book, especially with poor Poul: “That could never happen now. Once but never again. It could never happen again.”)

It’s a sign of how well drawn and well cast these characters were that they can so easily come alive in print. This certainly helps, as a fair chunk of the novel is spent following one of them instead of the Doctor or Leela. Never one to waste something useful, Boucher also pulls in a Blake’s 7 character: Carnell, the “psycho-strategist” with the piercing blue eyes who fancied Servalan. (He’s another one who returns in the Kaldor City series.) If it feels like Boucher is raiding his idea cupboard, just be glad he’s sticking to the good ones.

Rest assured though, the Doctor and Leela get plenty to do. The Doctor has some hair-raising encounters with dozens of freshly made cyborgs who follow him around, as well as a Terminatore-esque fight with one of them later, a helicopter crash and a one-on-one with the dangerous robot at the centre of it all. Boucher is quick to have the Doctor highlight the easily-led quality of robots, and he echoes this in a thought about warriors, extrapolating nicely the dangers of control and groupthink: “When he emerged again no one had moved an inch as far as he could tell. He made a mental note to be careful what he told these people to do and not to do.” / “That was one of the arguments he had against narrowly specific training; it tended to make behaviour narrowly specific.” / “When he had realised that he must be careful of what he said to those newly formed robots he had met in the hatchling dome, he thought, he should have made a mental note to be careful when speaking to the humans as well.” The Doctor here is reassuringly witty and only a little bit condescending about Leela. (“There was no sign either of the fighting [Leela] claimed to have heard, and the uncharitable thought struck the Doctor that she was probably running around the place trying to start some.”)

Perhaps unsurprisingly (although I mustn’t take it for granted), Leela shines. Following the gauntlet that was Last Man Running, we find the warrior companion more cautious this time, actively trying to avoid fighting when she knows she will win (“They were stupid and disgusting but was that reason enough to kill them?”) and encouraging a fellow fighter not to use lethal force if possible. That doesn’t mean she’s a pacifist — circumstances push her to violence several times, and she’s unashamedly proficient at it, particularly when fighting off cannibals in a slum. But you sense thoughtfulness in her approach, as well as a commitment to the still-present gulf between her understanding of the world and the Doctor’s. (“Was it possible that the TARDIS had miraculously brought them back to a time before the death of Taren Capel? No. Her every instinct told her it was not possible. When they fought him they did not know him for what he was. If this was before then how would they not have known? She must ask the Doctor about this.”) She feels like a character still growing, which makes sense as the novel is specifically placed after Last Man Running.

I’ve seen some comments on the overall writing in Corpse Marker being more like that of a novelisation. I think that’s rather uncharitable. There are plenty of occasions where Boucher uses prose to subtly hint at the mental state of a character, like those strange little repetitions (“That must be what it was. He was losing his mind — that must be what it was”), and there are some neatly omniscient hints at what’s really going on or of things to come, which make the story feel like it’s happening on a bigger canvas. (“No one other than Captain Lish Toos herself must be allowed to know that her assassin was not human.”) There’s some unashamedly poetic description too (on a robot killing spree: “killing like murderous children, murderous like parents killing”) and even a bit of that distinctly Boucher-esque weirdness viz a world-building hint that Kaldor is in a cycle of robot uprisings that they’ve all just forgotten about.

Not to lift one book up just by putting down another, but I’d say there’s a general improvement here over Last Man Running. The earlier book had some ideas that might have worked better on screen, such as a jungle segueing into a forest, and both of those being eerily quiet. There’s a great bit here with Leela examining her surroundings whilst pretending to be asleep, which is something that really works best in prose. Then after she catches her captors unaware and breaks one of their arms, we cut away, and when we return they’re all eating together — which immediately demonstrates the respect she’s earned without having to laboriously point it out. I don’t think Boucher is ever noticeably just transcribing action.

Perhaps the only bum note for me was the ending, which seems in too much of a hurry and doesn’t fully satisfy. The immediate trouble with the robots is over, but there’s such a mess already that it seems optimistic to rule out more of it. The ARF is exposed as something of a sham, but not in such a way that any of them actually learn from it. Uvanov and Carnell respectively win and lose at their manipulations, but you get the sense that the problems of Kaldor haven’t even blinked, so has a great deal of this even mattered? Perhaps that’s why there was room to create further (audio) stories. I definitely felt as though Boucher was quite happy diving into and expanding this world, but then maybe someone said “don’t forget it’s only 280 pages” so he quickly fashioned a stopping point rather than truly rounding it off.

If you liked The Robots Of Death then there’s a lot to like here, although Corpse Marker is not the same kind of Agatha Christie-ish thriller as before. Boucher is like a kid in a candy store with the setting and characters, and the plot is complex, but admittedly without time to process its conclusions it does leave a bit to be desired. It has a little of that Boucher-esque lack of clarity in places, but otherwise it feels like a leap forward for the author. It’s a good example of the range, and I’m glad it’s among the (too few) BBC and Virgin books that got a flashy reprint in recent years.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #58 – Frontier Worlds by Peter Anghelides

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#29

Frontier Worlds

By Peter Anghelides

We’re now a few books into the new normal, or “minus Sam/plus Compassion”, but there hasn’t been much in the way of normality. After the pyrotechnics of Interference came the highly experimental The Blue Angel; after that came a lot of lore-heavy histrionics in The Taking Of Planet 5. I don’t object to books taking big swings, but doing it three books in a row has been a bit exhausting.

Enter Frontier Worlds which — phew — is more down to Earth. The Doctor, Fitz and Compassion are investigating strange experiments on the planet Drebnar, although that’s secondary to the planet having dragged the TARDIS down there. It’s one of those that starts in media res, and it’s one of those where they’ve gone undercover with jobs and everything. I love that feeling of really mucking in and investigating; the New Adventures crushed this when Roz and Chris were around, and Fitz and Compassion make a similar impact here.

Fitz, as “Frank Sinatra”, has an office job and all the internecine annoyances that come with it; he also has a steady girlfriend, Alura. Compassion, or “Nancy Sinatra” (guess who chose the names) is going even more undercover as a somewhat bubbly office girl, keeping a few flirtations on the boil just to find out more. The Doctor wants the two of them working together; it would be beneficial, perhaps especially for Compassion, for these guys to get along.

Right away this is my favourite thing about Frontier Worlds. Now, I think it’s unfair to consider the absence of certain “Doctor Who companion” beats as a failing; the more of these I read, the more I realise that stuff like “spend an episode bedding in the new companion” is mostly a new series invention, and it’s wrong to take it as read that it will be in old books or episodes. Nevertheless, we haven’t had this stuff with Compassion, who joined the TARDIS more or less between books, and I am reading these books with a post-new series brain, so it’s just doomed to irritate me a bit when it’s not there. What can you do. (You’d think I would learn, since we also skipped it with Fitz. And as for Sam…!)

Whatever the reason behind it, Frontier Worlds seems to recognise the room for improvement here, so it spends time on the leads. We get gobs of first person prose with Fitz, which is immediately the sort of no-brainer creative decision that ought to become standard operating procedure. He’s disarming, hilarious and vulnerable, buoying the text nicely where otherwise it might threaten to become procedural. When things with Alura take a shocking turn his cheerful outlook is then doused in cold water, leading to at least one act of, if not revenge, at least a brutal act of not trying terribly hard to help the guilty party. “Fitz suffers” already feels like an EDA trope, but I think this book handles it well, using it to show another side of the character.

We don’t get that close to Compassion — that’s sort of her thing — but after highlighting some of her physical peculiarities in The Taking Of Planet 5, here we focus on her emotional ones, the ways in which she does or (mostly) doesn’t relate to those around her. Some of the best stuff here is a now combat-hardened Compassion reassuring Fitz of his worth in this team. Describing a glance at the stars: “I’d see clouds and stars and vapour trails. The Doctor would see scientific classifications and animal shapes. You’d probably point out that the only reason we could see those things while we were staring up at the sky was because someone else had stolen our tent during the night.” That later turns out to have been a knowing pep talk and not wholly sincere, and that speaks to how absent Compassion is from Fitz’s idea of normal — but it still makes clear that she can, albeit academically, care about her friends. She overall seems to regard this business as a mission to execute. That’s not a new archetype for a companion; her ease with violence puts her in a similar bracket to Leela, for one. But it’s an approach that works, and keeps things moving.

I also liked the way Anghelides made use of their shared physical history. Both Compassion and Fitz have been replicated by the Remote; neither is the person they once were, with Fitz benefiting from a more nuanced set of memories stored in the TARDIS to make him whole again, or at least as close as he can get. Anghelides is right to underline this as a neurosis for Fitz; can he ever be sure who he is? Compassion, having not undergone such a drastic flip-flop, naturally feels more comfortable with her “remembered” self, and rejects the Doctor’s insinuation that she could grow more into the shape of the person she was.

All of this dovetails nicely with the plot, which concerns an alien method of “regeneration” with wildly dangerous side-effects that can ostensibly extend your lifespan. The question of whether the people undergoing these changes are really still themselves afterwards is an effective parallel for the Remote history of Compassion and Fitz (whose shared, too-perfect DNA also figures into the plot), not to mention the Doctor, who knows a thing or two about the Ship of Theseus/Trigger’s broom.

Perhaps that underlying echo explains his rather dishevelled characterisation in Frontier Worlds. Early on Fitz clocks that he “wasn’t like a kid any more”, although admittedly that was following a death-defying fall down a snowy cliff and chase that has left him ragged and bloodied. The Doctor in this seems heightened and vulnerable, just as Fitz does, at one point coming close to a painful vivisection and only escaping thanks to bluffing for time and rushing his aggressor at the last moment. His best laid plans don’t end up happening thanks to Fitz and Compassion’s imperfection, but he manages to steer things right anyway. The whole network of trying to stay one step ahead and then having to wing it speaks, hopefully, to the sort of dynamic we can expect from these three: smart and competent, but woolly enough to remain interesting.

Perhaps it’s inevitable that the focus on character dynamics comes at the expense of the plot. That’s not me segueing into “the plot’s bad actually” — more an acknowledgement that there isn’t a huge amount of it here. Sometimes that’s fine. Frontier Worlds is definitely an example of having just enough plot to hang the cool stuff on. And there’s plenty of that, with the aforementioned death-defying jump being just the first example. There’s a lot of memorable action and violence in this, from body horror (characters literally shedding their skins to be reborn) to more general horror (a man walking into an industrial shredder; later, a man falling into a combine harvester) to action movie fare (snow bike chases; a struggle to escape a cable car in a lightning storm). As unpleasant as it can be, it’s brilliantly clear to visualise, particularly where a lot of it takes place in snowy vistas. I would bet David A. McIntee enjoyed reading this one.

For all of that though, there are effective smaller moments. There’s the Doctor’s bookended visits to a man with no short term memory, trapped in a sense of panic whenever his wife leaves the room; Fitz’s inability to break it off with Alura for the sake of the mission, and then his heartbreak when that decision is taken away from him; and there’s all the silly ground-level annoyance of office politics, with “Frank” and “Nancy” navigating local irritants and arranging business deals. You get a convincing sense of how well they’ve integrated here, and at least some sense of how an office job on Drebnar differs from one on Earth.

I’d be lying if I said I raced through Frontier Worlds, but I suspect that’s more on my touch-and-go attention span than the book itself. This is a decent (if trad) story very competently told, heightened when it needs to be and making the most of its lower stakes by making the regular characters the stars. I doubt it dazzles many readers as much as the preceding books, but for whatever reason it’s right up my alley.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #57 – Divided Loyalties by Gary Russell

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#26

Divided Loyalties

By Gary Russell

Oh boy, here we go. I was looking forward to this one in an admittedly morbid sort of way. Divided Loyalties is regarded as a bit of a stinker in some circles and there is a certain catharsis to reading that sort of book — or reviewing it, at least.

It would be refreshing to say that everyone’s just being mean and it’s brilliant actually, just as it would be rudely amusing to say that it’s as bad as the worst reviews make out. I’m going to be a pain and say that it’s neither of those things exactly — although Divided Loyalties still isn’t very good.

It’s on arguably shaky ground to begin with just by being a sequel to The Celestial Toymaker. This is all subjective, natch, but I find that story’s structure rather unsatisfying: the original Toymaker story is essentially ON, <however many random games you wish to include>, OFF, with little story or character progression in between. It could be four episodes long or forty. The same pattern was employed in another (unproduced) Brian Hayles script, The Queen Of Time, as well as in (to much stronger effect) The Mind Robber, which at least had the sense to mine storytelling itself for its random diversions, paying off quite spectacularly by mashing it all together at the end.

Gary Russell mostly avoids this problem. Divided Loyalties does the perilous if-you-lose-you-die thing, of course, but not until fairly late in the (ahem) game, at least where the TARDIS crew are concerned. We only see brief snatches of it beforehand, with an unassuming family kidnapped for the games and a man forced to play a giant form of Snakes & Ladders.

Rather than just play games all the time, most of the book is concerned with the characters playing them. Gary Russell is a past master at continuity links, which can be a slippery slope to just writing fan fiction, but if he’s going to put that list-friendly knowledge to practical use then I don’t really see an issue. He’s done it before: the strongest moments in The Scales Of Injustice are about where the Brigadier and Liz find themselves, and those ideas are genuinely informed by Russell’s fan card. A similarly concerted effort is made in Divided Loyalties to mine the lives of Tegan, Nyssa and Adric in order to Say Something about their place in the show, resulting in a sort of line being drawn under much of their Season 19 angst before setting off on the relatively low key Black Orchid. Kudos for trying, quite honestly.

Does the book still groan under the weight of continuity? Well, yes, but if you must mention Tegan’s aunt (Logopolis), uncle (The Awakening) and cousins (Arc Of Infinity) in order to make the point that she might miss the rest of her father’s life, and if you use that to put all her “Take me back to Heathrow!” histrionics into perspective, then I think that deserves a pass for character development.

Slightly less convincing is the repeated underlining of Nyssa’s trauma re the Master usurping her father’s body, and the Doctor failing to do anything about it. One of those opportunities for character development that’s missed by the original show and conspicuous by its absence when you put these characters into full length novels, it makes sense to address it, and effort is made so that it will be germane to the plot… but is it enough? I’d say not really. It’s enough trauma to fuel a novel, quite frankly, whereas here it’s only one item on the list; later on when we’re meekly told “Whatever did or didn’t happen between [Nyssa] and the Doctor regarding Tremas and the Master, it was dealt with”, it feels more like a “tell” than a “show” solution to the problem. Save it for a novel that has the Master in it, perhaps. (People who’ve read the book: hold that thought.)

Least convincing is what it does with Adric. As the book goes on and the mind games ramp up, with the three companions all seeing visions that somewhat displace their confidence in the Doctor, Adric is suggested to be trying his best to fit in and his intelligence is treated as unequivocal: the Toymaker himself is genuinely impressed. The early parts, however, include some of the most embarrassing fnar-fnar-nobody-likes-this-character takedowns I’ve ever seen in print. Adric is “someone who thought green and yellow pyjamas were the height of cool fashion”; he is “sarcastic, but unfunny … lazy and workshy and, above all, forgets to bathe regularly”; he is curious out of “an innate need to be nosy rather than because of any genuine intellectual advancement he might achieve”; he says things “pointlessly”, he “waddles”, he has a “snub nose”, he opens doors without thinking which causes the Doctor to roll his eyes (“[Adric] was all smiles, completely forgetting that it was his pathetic need to explore that had got them into this mess”), and he butts in “unhelpfully” with things like “‘I’m an orphan, too,’ said Adric, presumably noticing that he hadn’t yet become the centre of attention.”

Some of this is perhaps meant to indicate Tegan’s particular distaste for him, although to be honest that reflects almost as nastily on her as it does on him. And an effort is arguably made to walk it back by highlighting what Adric is trying to do. Either way, it’s loathsome to read. I remember starting Divided Loyalties years ago as a teen and giving up shortly after the author made an honest to god effort to canonise Adric having noticeable BO. I mean, what are we doing here? This is fan fiction of the worst kind: the sort of “you know it’s true!” convention banter that engages with the perception of characters and not with the substance. Matthew Waterhouse would probably like a word. The editor certainly should have.

None of this, however, is likely to top the proverbial Things People Don’t Like About Divided Loyalties list. For this, we must turn to the middle of the book, where the TARDIS crew still don’t consciously know about the Toymaker — he has appeared to them in visions but, for some reason, blanked their memories of it afterwards. A sleep-inducing drug is used and the Doctor remembers something that helpfully informs the rest of the plot. Specifically his youth on Gallifrey, which we then enjoy for 60 pages. You thought the companions’ back stories were a bit heavy on the continuity? Oh, sweet summer child.

The important bit is that as a young man on Gallifrey the Doctor made an ill-considered trip to the Toymaker’s realm which cost him two of his friends, one of whom in a way that influenced the Toymaker over centuries. This is the problem that now needs to be resolved.

I’m not a fan of hastily-introduced prequel facts because you can’t fake the mileage — it’s all very well him saying “I think about that fateful mistake every single day!” now but he never mentioned it on telly, did he? (You would think it might come up in, say, The Celestial Toymaker.) In its defence, this does set up the book’s plot… but then that’s a bit of a bootstrap defence, since the plot’s reliance on it is entirely the author’s choice.

But oh, the rest of it. The Doctor doesn’t just decide to go there: first he hangs around with his friends, the Deca, a group of 10 mildly insufferable Oxbridge-in-space students that includes the Doctor, Koschei (the Master), Mortimus (the Monk), Ushas (the Rani), Magnus (the War Chief) and Drax (he isn’t cool enough to have two names). So not only did all of the renegade Time Lords boringly already know each other at school — they were all in the same friend group. Most of their heroic-or-villainous attributes are handily already more or less on record, with the Doctor in particular having such rampant wanderlust that he gets thrown out of the Academy for it. Again, this is a pitfall of prequels, and it’s pure fan-brain in action: you take a sequence of events and make it destiny, actually, because everything must fit into a sequence. (See also an embarrassing in-universe reference to “Tremas” being an anagram of “Master,” and that apparently being a sign of inevitability.) You just don’t need this stuff.

The rest of the Gallifrey section runs the gamut from things that probably need to be there for world-building (there’s lashings of Lungbarrow material including Badger) to things crowbarred in because somebody mentioned them once (the hermit who showed the Doctor “the daisiest daisy”) to things that arguably break the show if they show up too soon (the Doctor and friends learn about Daleks and Cybermen). Certainly the feel of a book like Lungbarrow is nowhere to be found here, as we are far more invested in cameoing characters like Azmael than delving into the atmosphere of the place. I’m only amazed that when Russell makes a point of saying the Toymaker’s features “reminded the Doctor of one of the lecturers back at Prydon Academy” he somehow stops short of saying it’s the one played by the same actor. About the only thing we’re not being abjectly fanwankerish about here is the TV story this is a sequel to, which is mostly present in iconography only; I don’t know if that’s Gary Russell showing restraint or just a case of there not being anything useful to draw from — see, perhaps, my objection to its arbitrary ON-OFF games.

The key issue for me is its hyping up the specialness of the Doctor and his desire to leave Gallifrey, rather than letting it be a gradual resistance to his people’s principles. It feels like flatlining a character arc to say, he was always this. But let’s be honest, the whole thing is a massive indulgence. And really, what’s it doing slap bang in the middle of a novel? It doesn’t do the pace any favours: the Toymaker’s mostly been dropping unnecessarily cryptic hints up to this point (if he wants the Doctor so badly then why not just get on with it?), and then we take a whole fifth of the book out just to back-fill continuity. By the time we arrive at the actual plot with all the characters apprised of the facts it’s nearly home time.

I haven’t yet mentioned the plot particulars, but to be honest they’re not very arresting. The reclusive planet Dymok has gone radio silent; the orbiting station Little Boy II (a somewhat crass allusion to Nagasaki) is where the Doctor and co turn up, and they’re only too happy to help investigate. The crew, in defiance of Gary Russell’s usual writing style, don’t spend every waking hour sniping at each other, but there’s not much else to say about them. (There’s plenty of names, but that just gives us some useful losers for the games later on.) When some of them arrive on Dymok they find a people perpetually asleep; their dreams fuel the Toymaker, who we learn (in part during the Gallifrey continuity dump) is the Guardian of Dreams. The Doctor’s intrusion all those years ago is finally wearing off and the Toymaker needs his help to survive. And/or a new host, which naturally will be the Doctor. Cue the games, at long last.

Despite taking all that time out to set it up, there is a lot of explaining still to do around the Toymaker and his schemes. There’s also a lot of explaining to do around the Observer, a tangential figure with his own stake in events, and his schemes. The mind games affecting the companions are due in part to both of these figures, and the goalposts for what they’re actually trying to achieve move as all the explainifying goes on. To be honest, I just started nodding along by the end. The games — surreal exercises where people turn into giant chess pieces etc — ultimately feel like a minor concern, and certainly they don’t come alive as much in print as they would do on screen. The stakes, as far as the Doctor’s old friends are concerned, feel inevitably rushed since we only just met them. (Millennia, in particular, barely features.) The conclusion is rather hazy on this front.

There is some good use of the Toymaker here — I’m thinking of his mind-reading, which basically means picking up on the third-person prose happening all around him — but I did wonder if Russell could have gone further with a metaphysical character like that in a book setting. (Should this one be more like Conundrum?) I don’t know if I’d really call it a strong use of the Toymaker character overall, but then there isn’t much to go on. Making him the “Guardian of Dreams” seems like a reach? I don’t remember dreams featuring heavily in his one TV appearance. Nor in The Nightmare Fair, the cancelled 80s sequel that Gary Russell nevertheless bothers to segue into at the end of this.

It is, surprisingly, quite a good one for the Doctor, or at least for the incarnation we’re seeing here. The Fifth Doctor tends to be about as imposing as the celery he insists on wearing, but he’s pleasingly no-nonsense here, at one point pushing down an antagonist’s gun with a finger. Russell works in some authentically Davison-y “hmmm!”s, as well as incorporating the half-moon glasses from Frontios; perhaps they’re a talisman of Good Davison Doctoring. Russell is a bit less successful writing the “prequel” Doctor; obviously I’ve got my objections to his character arc and goodness knows to all that fanwank as well, but the actual character isn’t really distinct from the Davison one we’re seeing elsewhere. (Both do “hmmm!” and “my dear” at points.) It definitely feels like a stretch to put William Hartnell on the cover, even if canonically that is who it would be.

It might be less frustrating if Divided Loyalties had been a complete write-off, but there’s some real intent here to make something of the continuity (where the companions are concerned) and to do something slightly different (where the Toymaker is concerned). The choice to spend a lot of pages tying up plot points both pertinent and pointless is a millstone, however, weighing down any goodwill to the rest of it and effectively removing any sense of momentum. In the end, Divided Loyalties plays itself.

4/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #56 – The Taking Of Planet 5 by Simon Bucher-Jones & Mark Clapham

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#28

The Taking Of Planet 5

By Simon Bucher-Jones & Mark Clapham

Things are looking up for the Eighth Doctor Adventures. A range of books with much to recommend, they nevertheless often find themselves in ruts, usually consisting of visits to ill-fated colony worlds or, if Sam Jones is around, the nearest hospital. There’s a definite sense post-Interference that this will no longer do, and quite right. The scale of storytelling is much grander all of a sudden. You can’t move for all the ambition flying around.

This has its downsides. I found The Blue Angel all too pleased with itself and apparently keen to keep its genius out of reach of the reader. I felt like my time had been wasted. The Taking Of Planet 5 isn’t quite so obscure, but there is still that sense of authors trying really hard to prove how clever they are. I’m genuinely glad that there seems to be a renewed mission statement at BBC Books — be bigger, grander, don’t be afraid to get complicated — but I wonder if they’ve hit the accelerator a little too hard.

Once again we’re playing with ideas and entities established by Lawrence Miles (they didn’t pay that guy enough), and it’s not just him. The Doctor is intrigued by the apparently real existence of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Elder Things” so he takes Fitz and Compassion back to Earth’s pre-history to investigate. Here he finds Time Lords from his own future (Miles’s War In Heaven from Alien Bodies) masquerading as Elder Things after killing all the real ones. (Or, spoiler alert, the “real” ones.) They have a plan to help win their war, but this is in jeopardy because the Celestis (estranged Time Lord splinter group, also Alien Bodies) have infiltrated their group, hoping to usurp the plan for themselves. To make things worse, the two Celesti agents don’t share the same agenda. Meanwhile, 12 million years in the future, an Antarctic base in 1999 is investigating the fallout from what will happen here. Compassion has somehow straddled the two time periods.

It’s definitely complicated, and it’s not made any easier by all the characters being in disguise. The Time Lords look like blobby eldritch horrors, although that’s not their normal appearance; the Celestis look bizarre in their own way, but (when they’re not casually making themselves two-dimensional) they’re disguised as Time Lords disguised as eldritch horrors — actually, both are disguised as the same one. In the 1999 portion of the story one of the scientists is secretly a Time Lord agent, and pretty soon another one is a Celesti in disguise, killing and copying a little like The Thing.

Navigating all this can be tricky, especially when the Celestis are called “One” and “Two” and are sharing the same disguise. It’s harder still without a lot to get your teeth into character-wise. Both groups investigating this site either side of 12 million years, the Time Lords and the humans, could do with more definition.

The Time Lords are split into veterans and newborns, with the varying levels of experience that implies; their leader Xenaria has a certain no-nonsense attitude that comes across well, subordinate Holsred is quite likeable, but the rest could just as easily be random names generated as the novel went along. They believe the Doctor to be a general from their own ranks pretty much just because he said so, which is great as an example of the doctor’s ability to take (or fake) authority, but does rather diminish them as a serious concern. They’re all a bit silly, albeit knowingly so: busy people encumbered with tentacles.

The humans are worse. The Taking Of Planet 5 has quite an irreverent sense of humour, which is perhaps another carry-over from Lawrence Miles (he treats this sort of universe-bothering weirdness much the same, even in Interference), but it manifests rather awkwardly at times, particularly in 1999. Pretty much the only thing going for the humans character-wise is that McCarthy, an American woman, is fat, something the book finds very amusing. (“Luckily her butt was big enough to absorb most of the impact as she hit the ground.” Oof.) The rest all snap at each other or, where men and women are concerned, boringly lust after one another. The most interesting one isn’t human. There is indeed a joke to be made about whether you’d notice if these guys had been bodysnatched. You might hope to latch onto these scenes for their contribution to the plot, but nothing very interesting is happening in the 1999 part of the story, other than explaining how Compassion got there or why there’s a big hole in the dig site — things that, once revealed, are really more technical explanations given than great mysteries solved.

That’s the book’s main issue for me: a lot of it feels academic. That’s not to say it doesn’t have interesting ideas. The faked existence of characters from H.P. Lovecraft (and by extension, the ability to manifest any literary nonsense as real) is an obvious story goldmine, but the creatures are dead by the time we arrive and the device is hardly used again, very much damp-squibbing the Doctor’s assertion that “we’d better be prepared to meet anything. Anything at all.” The Time Lord plan is quite grand, involving the release of an ancient horror that might doom us all etc, but it rests entirely on close familiarity with a Classic story that is itself barely represented here. Granted, it’s safe to assume that sort of nerd pedigree in the readership — who else are these books aiming at? — but the casual way said story is invoked leaves us without any of its original legwork or sense of danger.

Then you have the Celesti plan — or plans I suppose, oy — which entirely concerns their headquarters, Mictlan. (A weird Hell analogue that is mysteriously falling apart.) Quite apart from why the reader should care about a place this fundamentally unpleasant, the existence or destruction of Mictlan is neither here nor there for most of the characters, besides One and Two. And heck, even those two feel differently about it. Blow it up, don’t blow it up. Ehh. (You can see how this will figure into the War In Heaven arc, so I’m willing to concede it will be interesting. But right now do the Doctor, Fitz or Compassion give much of a stuff either way? Not really. Should we, if they don’t?)

The best we’ve got in terms of stakes is general suggestiveness about the wider story arc(s), but for obvious reasons none of that pays off here. The War In Heaven doesn’t noticeably budge, although you can see how the removal of Mictlan might matter to all that. As to the other plan, it probably would have been a bad idea to try to control Evil From The Dawn Of Time #numbers anyway — it places the entire universe at risk to even try — but hey ho, they’re prevented from doing so because the Doctor is around to course correct, which is another thing that makes the Time Lords look like unthinking idiots for even attempting it. Still, this kind of thing suggests a way that a war in the distant future can affect the here and now. Considering the Doctor would rather not know about any of it, that’s probably the only way we’re going to integrate it into the EDAs.

Probably the most compelling thing about The Taking Of Planet 5 is another little ongoing Easter egg hunt, viz, what’s going on with Compassion? Fitz and the Doctor haven’t forgotten about her ease with piloting TARDISes in The Blue Angel, and we add to that a strange ability to make use of the signals around her and make inexplicable, powerful sounds that control her surroundings. Her personality is still a little on the rudimentary side — unemotional yet bitchy, a sci-fi favourite — but the authors are all in with the peculiarities of this ex-Remote person. She’s utterly unfazed by her wrench across 12 million years, and quickly falls into a sort of Doctor-companion role with the secret Time Lord, albeit both of them are a bit less friendly than the duos we’re used to. I still think it’s weird that the books skipped her addition to the crew, but there’s some back-filling of a sort here: the Doctor considers “whether letting her join him in the TARDIS had been the solution to her problems”, suggesting there had been a thought process there, and when Compassion thinks she’s stuck on Earth she thinks how “[she] could have hoped to travel for longer, but Earth would have to do for the immediate future”, telling us she actually wants (or wanted) to do this. Hey, it’s just nice to have it confirmed. Anyway, apart from that we’re engaging with the interesting things about her, which from past experience is not something to take for granted.

The Doctor and Fitz fare less well. The Doctor is a bit of a rough sketch in this one, with a “goldfish attention span and constant energy”. Between his not-trying-all-that-hard subterfuge with the blobby Time Lords and his getting caught up in a lot of TARDIS action near the end, he has a tendency to fade into the background of the plot, at one point ceding what feels like Doctorly action to that guy in 1999. (He even has an equivalent sonic screwdriver!) I liked the bit where he sympathised with the terrible evil thing and considered going back to rescue it one day.

Fitz has never been friendlier or, in all honesty, less useful to the plot than he is here, but he’s a delight to be around; highlights of his activities include an arguably sexual encounter with an Elder Thing-disguised Celesti, because Fitz gonna Fitz. He’s mostly here to bluntly and repeatedly ask what’s going on, which feels like something I ought to be critical of but to be honest this time I was relieved to hear it. Even the Doctor at one point remarks that “It’s all so confusing I could do with explaining it to myself.”

I wonder if the mixture of ambitious-bordering-on-convoluted scheming and the occasional simple restating of facts is a hint of the cowriting process between Bucher-Jones and Clapham. See also, the helpful (I mean it!) recaps of how Fitz became Kode and then Fitz again, what Compassion’s deal is, and even a whiff of how The Blue Angel came about and where it’s left the Doctor emotionally. Maybe that was all done by one author or the other or both, but I think in mixing it up The Taking Of Planet 5 keeps just on the right side of confusing. It doesn’t help with the general sprawling state of it as a piece of drama, but at least you’ve got plenty to think about.

A last thing to mention would be the general jolly nerdiness of the thing. Obviously there’s the geeking out about Lovecraft, which is mostly lost on me as I haven’t read any. (See also White Darkness.) There’s an obvious debt to a certain 70s story, although as mentioned that’s not handled all that well. The stuff I liked most was the sprinkling of references, something I’m normally immune to but in the context of a big complicated event, and with the general sense of humour employed, it adds a certain levity to an at times stodgy book. There are nods to things as disparate as zygma energy, Karfel, Morlox, Stangmoor Prison, Raston Warrior Robots, Ogri and D-Mat guns. There’s a pre-emptive puncturing of the mysterious Enemy of the Time Lords: “They’ll probably be terribly disappointing. With my luck it’ll turn out to be Yartek, leader of the alien Voord, with a big stick.” The plot manages to explain (although did it need explaining?) the way the people on Delphon communicate with their eyebrows, as well as the way the Tersuruns communicate with a less subtle bodily function. (The Curse Of Fatal Death is canon!) There are oodles of references to looms, helping to settle that debate, as well as a brief mention of Tehke, a deity who’d turn up in the final New Adventure co-written by Mark Clapham two months after this. (Nice to see a bit of Virgin cross-promotion. All friends here.) And on the less meta or piss-taking side there’s also the casual suggestion that the Doctor’s poor piloting in the early years of Who was a deliberate effort to avoid the Time Lords. Head-canon for sure, but I’ll allow it.

I think all of that mild indulgence helped ground The Taking Of Planet 5 for me during its bigger indulgences — a knowingly fuzzy plot with tons of moving parts that all leans on Importance To The Arc(s). I was rarely hooked but I made it through quite painlessly. Saying that, this now makes three Important And Slightly Difficult books in a row. I appreciate the jump in ambition but it’s starting to get a bit stuffy in here. Does every book need to be a massive mind-boggler?

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #55 – City At World's End by Christopher Bulis

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#25

City At World's End

By Christopher Bulis

Now for something a bit more normal.

After the continuity-bending antics of Interference, which affected the Past Doctor books as well as the Eighth Doctor ones, you could be forgiven for expecting the PDAs to play a little fast and loose with the rules. Christopher Bulis probably wouldn’t be your go-to guy for that — his book The Ultimate Treasure was used, however fairly or unfairly, by Lawrence Miles as an example of an unadventurous PDA — and sure enough his next one is set before Interference, which keeps the established rules in place.

I don’t think that really matters though. Despite any preconceived notions of mine, Bulis is no more obligated to write an unusual book than Miles was to write Revenge Of The Quarks. A self-contained story set between telly episodes might automatically mute the “main characters might die” alarm but — all due respect to Miles — there are other things to be gained from a story set in a specific moment of continuity. Look at The Witch Hunters, The Roundheads and Eye Of Heaven. Just try to write something compelling and/or in an interesting way. If it’s good, it’ll be worth it. Lots of things can be at stake other than the Doctor and co.’s literal lives.

To its credit, City At World’s End puts a lot of things at stake. Right from the prologue an asteroid collision has knocked the moon of the planet Sarath out of a stable orbit. It’s going to smash into Sarath and end all life there. The TARDIS deposits the First Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Susan there with roughly one month until the collision. Their understandable urge to leave right away is thwarted when the building they’re on collapses in a meteor shower; suddenly the TARDIS is lost under rubble, Barbara is missing and Susan is hospitalised. Soon the TARDIS key is missing as well. They must recover it, get back together and leave before the planet is doomed. 

But even apart from all that, what are the people going to do? Should the TARDIS crew simply leave them to their fate? Forcing the characters to stick around automatically underlines this question, and the ultimate fate of Arkhaven (the only city on the planet) is kept up in the air for most of the book.

Our first impression is a memorable one: the building where the TARDIS lands is a fake, mocked up to give the appearance of a functioning city full of moving cars and busy activity. Arkhaven is actually nothing of the sort, the human population having been devastated by war with the native Taklarians. (The initial purpose of the fake buildings was to create false targets in the war.) Most of the survivors don’t know about this. Are they being lied to about anything else?

This whole phoney-city setup would still be interesting, in an admittedly doolally but recognisably 60s-sci-fi way, even without the moon collision aspect. I enjoyed the thought experiment of whether you can really be sure that London has millions of people in it. (I mean you probably can if you give it some thought, but it’s still imaginative to ask.) I’m less convinced though that the survivors could be kept from realising that 98% of their population had died just by turning everything around them into sets and animatronics — at least some of the survivors would have missing friends or family, surely? — but by that point we’re relying on your personal reserve of suspension of disbelief. The further we get into Arkhaven’s problems, and there are many, the more it seems that Bulis is over-reliant on that.

The book’s next big idea is a class system. Arkhaven has Functionaries (regular people who mainly work towards the exodus from Sarath), the Elite (rich people whose grip on society is slackening as the planet is endangered), the Church (who believe “the Maker”, and not a migration from Earth, put them all on Sarath — their grip is also slackening) and the NC2s (“Non-Citizen, Non-Conformists” – an underclass kept in internment camps). There’s heaps to unpack here, and I suspect no amount of the Doctor and co. sticking around would be enough to sort it out.

The thorniest issue is probably the NC2s. When one of them escapes a camp with the Doctor’s TARDIS key, the Doctor is happy to report the man to the authorities. Ian rebukes him for this (“I’m not sure I like the way you’ve implicated that trader, Doctor. After all, he was only helping what amount to refugees and political prisoners to escape”) but not much more is said on the disparity and cruelty towards this underclass. Escapees are, unknown to the prisoners, rounded up and returned by young Elite members as sport, which is another dystopian idea that would be interesting even without the “world’s about to end” setting. We don’t do enough with it here; the main NC2 we follow outside the camp (Gelvert, who nicked the key) ends up exiting the story abruptly and somewhat flushing away the time we spent with him in the process, also taking away our main link to the NC2s. (Minor point, but it’s here that the key disappears and is never found. Luckily there’s another one in circulation, but still — where did it go?)

If someone like Ace had featured, you can bet they’d be leading the charge to rescue the NC2s and indict the ruling class. I get that the First Doctor is unlikely to think like that — such compassion is literally what the companions were for in those days, particularly Ian — but it feels wrong to let this aspect of Arkhaven society slide in a Doctor Who story. It’s explained to the Doctor and Ian that not everyone can escape the calamity and therefore some people must be excluded, which makes a brutal sort of sense I suppose, but it feels like there is a wider and very heated conversation to have off the back of that. Such as, how can you condemn a whole subset of society out of hand? Why treat them so badly when they’re going to die anyway? Doesn’t the hatred coming from the Elite suggest that a new world won’t solve your society’s problems, and maybe you should work on them now? Are you ultimately more deserving of survival than anyone else? City At World’s End clearly isn’t the sort of book to get into the moral weeds on any of this — the NC2 camps drop out of the story for most of it, that’s that I guess — so why set up the debate in the first place?

There’s a lot going on here, and inevitably some of it feels extraneous, there to give the characters (and the book) something to get on with other than the end of days. This meta concept figures into the plot at times, so it must be deliberate, but I’m not willing to give every idea the same pass. The Church’s power grab is definitely running its course just to keep people busy — okay, score one to Bulis. (They’re not very interesting baddies, evangelical characters rarely are, but they’re surprisingly well armed.) Then there are the disappearances happening outside the city — these feel random for ages, but they do eventually feed into the “fate of Arkhaven” story. Fair enough.

Even the machinations that do serve a purpose though serve to distract the reader (and not just, however usefully, the characters) from the looming threat — there are barely any material reminders about the moon collision, and there’s no sense of escalation as it gets nearer. They’re weeks away from the end of all life on the planet! Shouldn’t we see some evidence outside of the opening scenes? And yeah, I know it’s baked into the plot, but the lack of panic about all this begins to work against the tension. Scenes of police officers investigating dangerous church members feel superfluous in the extreme. (As if Bulis has only just remembered, the collision is moved up to about four hours in the final chapters. Oh right, now they panic.)

Then we have the subplot about Taklarians kidnapping and brainwashing people to interfere with the launch. This accounts for most of Barbara’s story in the book (although she is made to forget about it) — however, events conspire so that she didn’t even need brainwashing, and by the end most of the characters didn’t even know about the Taklarian threat. So what were we building up to, exactly? Or was it just to imply a greater purpose for Barbara than “thanklessly trudge through pipes and rubble until you are rescued”?

And hey, since we’re talking about them, what about the Taklarians? They’re native to this planet, apparently. Are we not going to touch on colonialism at all, since the Arkhaven settlers presumably chose someone else’s planet to live on? Yes, it’s sad that millions of humans are dead, but so are nearly all of the Taklarians. No, they’re not very nice, but why should they be? Again it feels like someone ought to be asking why group X deserves to make it out of here alive and group Y doesn’t. The fact that the Taklarians are painted exclusively as Baddies seems to nullify the point. I’m sure I don’t need to highlight the various BBC Books that already mentioned indigenous aliens as well as the rights thereof, however much those books might have bungled it. It’s just weird to skip all of that here.

Everywhere you look in City At World’s End there’s an idea or a character that’s probably quite interesting in isolation but doesn’t have the room to breathe. It can be argued, for example, that the last act villain reveal is a valid one, folding into the overall idea of rulers lying to their people about the state of their city and adding a twist to those mysterious disappearances, as well as finally examining the remarkable machine technology of Arkhaven. But this leads to yet another new group who arguably have rights (they seem to have awareness) and therefore, despite their violence, should have as much claim to getting off this rock as the humans. But they’re largely done away with when the bad guy (or “bad guy”) gets his comeuppance, so once again just never mind I guess. (PS: they have their own brainwashing plot, entirely separate from the Taklarian one. We’re seriously doing “army of sleeper agents” twice in one story, where neither group knows about or impacts the other?)

Probably the most interesting thing about this largely unexamined new group at the end is that one of them is a duplicate of one of the regulars, but that too is (of course) mostly not examined, a can of worms opened just enough to help round off the resolution. Certainly the behaviour of the Doctor towards this character raises questions about identity and the soul, questions he’s very much not engaging with. Now, I’m not against throwing in weird and crazy ideas — please do! But if they don’t mean much to the characters, what are they for? Certainly at this late stage in the story.

City At World’s End is somewhat at odds with itself. Its ambitions are grand, even sprawling at times, but the writing is entirely down to earth. Some of the story mechanics are as old as the hills, particularly the “we lost the TARDIS key” gambit and (stop me if you’ve heard this one) “we wouldn’t be in this situation if it wasn’t for [the Doctor’s] insistence on exploring the city.” Never mind that this is BBC Book: umpty-squillion set on an old Earth colony world. (Although kudos for making it so far along in its history that they’ve forgotten Earth even existed.)

Speaking of ancient mechanics, there’s a tendency towards bland rhetorical questions in the characters’ inner monologues. (“Ben looked at him curiously. He’d spoken quickly and easily, though his face was lined with worry. Was Ian privately losing hope of finding Barbara alive?”) Also the amount of info-dumping here could concuss a rhinoceros: in one scene the Doctor blackmails Gelvert into delivering a blow-by-blow account of how things work on Arkhaven, which is efficient for book purposes but far from subtle. Elsewhere people are always in need of updates which then require further summarising because we know it all already. (“‘While we’re stuck in here anyway, perhaps you could tell us what’s going on in your city?’ Curiosity replaced Plax’s bluster. ‘You really don’t know about the Ship, do you? It’s going to take us to Mirath…’ He gave a concise account of the situation in Arkhaven and a more grudging explanation of his own presence.”)

The writing creaks in a nuts and bolts way at times, with as-you-know-Bob name usage (“‘Please be patient, Prince Keldo.’ ‘We must know what she was doing down there, Thorken’”) and dialogue where one party only seems to show up to provide feed lines. (“‘I’m afraid the explosion might not have been an accident. It is consistent with the existence of the secret tunnel.’ Lant looked dazed. ‘What tunnel?’ ‘The one that runs under the city towards the mountains… at least, so the alignment suggests.’ ‘Alignment from where?’ ‘From the Ship through the point where you lost your mystery quarry.’ ‘What do you mean?’” You remind me of the babe, what babe, the babe with the power, what power…)

It probably should be an interesting one for the regulars, but — despite a very well-organised chapter structure that keeps the focus on one group at a time — they’re never doing all that much. Barbara trudges through a defunct subplot; Ian looks for Barbara; the Doctor tries to move things along with the rocket but keeps vital information to himself, when not refusing to engage with the morality of anything going on around him; and Susan arguably has a very interesting experience that raises questions (not including the action-y hostage crisis with the Church), but none are thought about in depth.

Despite everything though, City At World’s End kept my attention. Bulis has far too many hooks here, but the main one — how are these people going to get out of this? — is actively engaging for as long as possible. There’s a good amount of interest generated just by asking questions all the time, like what the hell that giant snake monster was about. (Not a question you’d expect to hear in a “survive the moon collision” story.) Some of the characters have a tendency to blur together, such as Draad and Lant, but there’s enough of a general air of likability to be invested in them when they’re in it, even if I suspect that Bulis had no idea what to make of any of their actions.

It’s messy, no doubt about it: thoroughly in need of a good prune and in dire need of more focus on the big questions. But as an exercise in plate spinning, what can I say? It’s quite engrossing and you could do worse.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #54 – The Blue Angel by Paul Magrs & Jeremy Hoad

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#27

The Blue Angel

By Paul Magrs & Jeremy Hoad

Huh.

It’s sort of quaint, really, remembering the way Interference made me feel the first time I read it a decade ago. Confused, miserable, the dreaded is-this-even-Doctor Who… but fast forward to now, and I see its value! Hooray! It was doing a thing and I mostly see what that thing was! It’s great when you can learn and grow as an audience and find a new appreciation for art and storytelling. Perhaps there’s hope for every unsatisfying book experience.

You can probably tell where this is going. Which, as we’ll learn, is an unusual phrase to hear in relation to The Blue Angel.

Much to my surprise, and I imagine the surprise of many contemporary readers, BBC Books immediately followed their guns-blazing weirdo of a two-part novel with something even more bizarre. Paul Magrs is back, with assistance from partner Jeremy Hoad, to deliver an adventure that uses much the same scattergun-of-imagination approach as The Scarlet Empress. Only more so. Much more. As in, hit the deck.

We’ve got the Doctor, Fitz and Compassion (hold that thought) in an adventure with some angry Star Trek types and some maybe-or-maybe-not malevolent people made of glass. We’ve got Iris Wildthyme, in her younger form from the end of Empress, in an escapade with a gaggle of older ladies and the currently inexplicable ersatz long lost son of one of them, escaping a shopping centre beset by giant owls. And we’ve got some sort of alternate world going on with another Doctor, Fitz, Compassion and Iris but not quite as we know them, with only the loosest connection to what’s happening in those other strands. These, by the way, include a travelling city made of glass, a universe set apart from our own, a realm that sits between the two, corridors of possibility (or maybe they’re just corridors), various alien races of varying animosity and a megalomaniac who looks like a green elephant with talons and magic powers. You’ve got, in short, lots to be getting on with. A pretty stocked shopping basket for lucky old you.

One of the things I struggled with on my most recent read of The Scarlet Empress (so much for learning and growing as you get older, huh) was its profusion of ideas with not exactly a heck of a lot of connective tissue. The Scarlet Empress, though, was a story about storytelling. I don’t love the lingering impression I got (however projected and erroneous it might be) that all of its ideas are automatically good ones and they will go together as long as you make the point that stories are sometimes messy creatures, but it at least felt like that point was being made. And to be honest, you could and perhaps should enjoy The Scarlet Empress as an adventure apart from any (I would argue rather on-the-nose in this case) meta writing commentary, provided you can (wince) switch off a few pernickety faculties and just let a story be for 280 pages, in whichever direction takes its fancy. I know all of that, but for whatever reason I struggled to get past it as an almost-40-year-old reader in a way that I just didn’t at around 20. There’s something to be said for being a young reader, clearly. I’ll probably read it again some day and I sincerely hope it’ll flip back the other way. I’d love to love it again. The Blue Angel, though, will be a tough one to pick up a second time.

I’ve read, or listened to a good chunk of work by Paul Magrs; enough to not take this book lightly. Okay, perhaps “lightly” is the wrong word — if anything his books are going for “lightly” with gusto, like frilly pink missiles — but what I mean is, I don’t assume there’s no thought behind it. He’s obviously a writer of skill. Even just looking at Empress, his prose had a deliberateness rarely found in the humble annals of Doctor Who fiction. It’s clear you’re in practiced hands; if you don’t get it, well that’s unfortunate, but it seems a safe bet that there is an “it” that you might “get”.

Well, I got nothin’ this time. The Blue Angel starts with an eerie sense of the uncanny with its surely-that-can’t-be-right alternate TARDIS team living in domestic normalcy, but it’s weird even to the point that I couldn’t tell who (out of the oddly phoney characters) was narrating at times. This is the first chapter. Then we’re off to visit a gaggle of ladies on a Christmas shopping trip, trying to ignore the (green) elephant in the room that is the miraculously returned son of Maddie, who is clearly not really her son Ian but is just as clearly intent on letting people think he is. This stuff is easier to get a grip on, at least.

Then we’re off to see the “proper” Doctor and co. in the midst of adventuring, but there’s a new elephant in the room in the form of a new companion — Compassion, one of the Remote from Interference, who we must assume at some point asked to join the Doctor and Fitz on their travels, or was asked to do so? That moment isn’t in Interference and it’s not here either. Should I miss it? Is something going on there? I know stuff is going on with Compassion, that much is made clear later on when she displays a weird aptitude for piloting TARDISes, but how much of what’s not here is important and how much is just because it was not of interest to Magrs and Hoad? I’m aware that I might just have New Series Brain when it comes to companion intros — Fitz also did the official “hey come and join us” scene when we weren’t looking — but I feel like even Classic Who bothered to at least state it.

There’s a sense of disorientation from the off, a sense that it’s not clear how things are connected (that’s hardly a crime) or how much we should invest in the characters we’re seeing (maybe a bit of a crime). No doubt it’s personal taste but starting the book with ersatz protagonists cut me adrift straight away: now I’m thinking, how many fakes are floating about? Since we’ve skipped what would obviously be a critical moment for any Doctor Who companion, can any of this be trusted? Are legs being pulled in all directions? That stuff with the owls is a bit silly isn’t it — but is it fun silly or “I’m Doing A Thing” silly? I know on some level this is down to me as a reader, but I was sat there asking these rather dull questions instead of simply enjoying myself. I never rowed back to the centre of the book after that uncanny opening; it resisted all attempts to get into it, not least because it was always hot-footing it over to another story strand.

That’s not to say The Blue Angel isn’t fun. Oh, it’s got whimsy and frippery for days! What else do you expect with the involvement of Iris Wildthyme, with her funny bus and her crazy outfits? That evil elephant is funny even just to look at. (Well, to imagine at least.) A carful of mildly acerbic older women is sure to be a source of mirth; there’s plenty of inherent whimsy in being on the run from massive owls, and then escaping in a double decker time-and-space bus. And did I mention the Star Trek thing? There’s a spaceship full of awful simplistic people (the captain is called “Blandish”) who check how much every action is going to cost them and otherwise shoot first and ask questions later, then barely progress as three-dimensional characters. It’s satire, Jim, but not etc.

I’m sorry. It’s difficult not to sound like a grumpy old sod when you’ve struggled with a book this badly, but struggle I did, and all of that Magrs (and apparently, Hoad) whimsy just didn’t wash with me this time. I fundamentally didn’t connect with the story (really, stories) unfolding all over the place here, which eventually started to pile up next to each other with various parties encountering various alien species who have hang-on-what names like Sahmbekarts and Steigertrude, all using various space-time conveyances to get from one to the other. Following it from page to page was something of a headache, and cheerily lampshading that with an “I don’t understand any of what’s going on” or an “everything has been brought here from somewhere, from some time. But it’s all without rhyme or reason” or a “call me prissy, pedantic if you like, but I do like to know where I am” or a “my concentration has been all over the place” or a yes-we-are-doing-this-again “learn to think of all these things as stories. And stories can’t contradict each other because, in the end, they’re all made up” does not actually help. A story that’s hard to follow and harder to care about on purpose risks being just as troubled as one that did it by accident.

The Blue Angel obviously is rewarding for a lot of people. I know I’m in the minority here — hell, I’d politely concede that I’m flat out wrong if you told me so — because I’ve seen the positive reviews. Even they seem more or less to agree though that the book doesn’t worry itself about an ending or tying anything up or making much sense in the first place, which frankly makes me wonder what the cheat code is for enjoying this thing because good grief all of that sounds iffy to me. I know it’s different strokes; clearly I’m someone who needs to feel a certain degree of understanding or I just feel as though I’ve wasted my time. Clearly I can’t benefit that much doubt. That doesn’t make it invalid to write a weird story, but it does freeze me out somewhat.

Okay, think positive. Praise has been levelled at Compassion in this. I’m so weirded out by the lack of a proper segway into full time adventuring that I don’t know what to make of her, though. (Or of BBC Books taking this particular swing — although to be clear, I am pro taking-swings.) She’s presented as a cold fish who fails to endear herself to new people (“And who did you say you were, dear? Contrition or something, wasn’t it?”) or people she already knows (“You could never have a really good argument with Compassion. You couldn’t wind her up”). Of course it’s early days but she’s not particularly impressive at the companion lark either (“‘[Compassion’s] a good person to have around in an emergency.’ Actually, [Iris] was thinking the exact opposite”), even getting lightly character-assassinated in the third person prose (“She was one of the least companionable of [the Doctor’s] many assistants”). We are presumably meant to get something out of her involvement here, but it’s hard to see what. She’s fully rebuked by the Doctor at one point — a moment I’ve seen held in good regard, but which flopped for me as a character beat, partly because I can’t quite picture the Eighth Doctor saying “You, madam, are stepping out of line” (not his only weirdly anachronistic line, see also “villainous scum”) but mostly because I don’t know this person and I don’t know that the Doctor knows this person and if she’s such an arse, well, why did you bring her along, then?

Fitz keeps his Interference continuity in check — both he and the Doctor highlight the rather odd rebirth he’s had recently — whilst also getting back to some good old fashioned horniness, as he hangs around with an aesthetically pleasing Iris and briefly considers a) leaving the TARDIS for the big red bus and b) whether she’d shag him. There isn’t a great deal else for him to do with his plotline (Iris, owls, horses at one point) being one of many that seem to have gone into a blender, but I liked the brief recognition that he’d never got a chance to say goodbye to Sam. I can, like most reviewers, see why Iris won him over so fast.

It’s… a story for the Doctor. I would hesitate to say it’s a good one because I don’t think he really rings true a lot here, even when he’s the “real” one, flying off the handle so much more than usual, but there’s clearly a lot of significance to him as a character throughout these events. Look at all that alt-universe stuff, with its suggestive oddities and its other Doctors squirrelled away in minor roles; the implicit importance of all this to him and Iris. Again though, we’re back to that sense of significance where I wish I could find the actual significance. At least the writers meant to do that?

The Doctor’s (spoiler) failure to make events turn out any better because that’s how Iris wants to do things is a serious fork in the road between them, and surely a statement about his interaction with the universe around him and how much he can really achieve there. Things are being said, definitely, I can see that — but when the events themselves are such a quasi-fantastical mishmash (I would summarise further but I really can’t be bothered) and the villain is such an overall silly goose, it feels a bit like firing a blank to posit them as relevant to an overall arc, especially when we run away from it all as fast as we do here. The crisis of another universe impinging on, and going to war with ours is huge. It should feel momentous. It doesn’t, with this kind of crazy pace and this much of a frivolous tone. I felt told about the Enclave (and much more so, the Obverse) more than I ever felt that I truly saw or understood it. When it all concludes, did those events suddenly end like that because something-something-the-Doctor or is that just the kind of adventure we were having this week? I bet I know what the answer is, but I don’t quite believe it. Even the gang of older ladies — surely the earthy heart of this novel — get bundled out of the story in a) a fantastical payoff for two of them that doesn’t stop to examine how they feel about it and b) y’know what I can’t remember where the other one went. The whole thing about the son didn’t seem to add up to much either.

Attaching a lot of its significance to Iris feels at least a bit overblown, even if the version of Iris in most of The Blue Angel is a much more competent one than we met the first time. She knows more than we do — must be nice. There’s something of an explanation for her and her weird relation to the Doctor’s history, but it’s moved on from just as quick as the main action. I don’t think I’m as invested in Iris generally as a lot of readers; her brand of randy nonsense ought to have been a tonic for all the confusion I felt reading this, but here it just added irritation to obscurity. I’m sorry, Iris. Maybe next time.

I made a lot of notes on this one, because there’s loads of stuff to pick up on — nudge-nudge plot arc stuff about the TARDIS, picking up the change to Planet Of The Spiders from Interference, fun little references to things like Looms and in one paragraph “new adventures” and a “virgin”; there’s plenty of imagery, some of it quite striking, like the weirdly Dalek-ish glass people and their whole society, plus all that suggestive alt-universe weirdness. And if you haven’t inadvertently made yourself cross and got a headache — ahem — there’s the sense of fun that always comes with Paul Magrs.

I just wish any of it helped. Sorry, Paul. Don’t mind me, people who love this one regardless. Despite everything I found The Blue Angel as impenetrable and insufferable as the bad old days of Virgin first-time novels, and the almost certain knowledge that I’m missing something thought-provoking here didn’t help in the slightest.

3/10